What gets stripped and what's kept?

All tags are removed; visible text is kept. Paragraph breaks become blank lines, headings keep their text but lose their size, lists become hyphen-prefixed lines. Scripts and styles are discarded entirely.

Does it preserve links?

Optional — toggle 'keep links' to append URLs inline like `text (https://example.com)`. Leave off for pure prose output.

How does it handle tables?

Tables are rendered as pipe-separated lines with header underlines. For complex tables the output degrades gracefully — the text is still readable.

Is this useful for email plain-text alternatives?

Exactly the primary use case — generate the text/plain MIME part of a marketing email from the HTML version. Also useful for readability metrics and word counts.

HTML → Plain Text | DevTools Surf

DevTools Surf

Example: HTML → Plain Text

A worked example, rendered from real sample data. Sign in to run the tool on your own input.

Input

<h1>Welcome</h1>
<p>Hello <strong>world</strong>! This is a <em>sample</em> document with a <a href="https://example.com">link</a> and an entity: &copy; 2024.</p>
<ul>
  <li>First item</li>
  <li>Second item</li>
</ul>

Output

# Welcome

Hello **world**! This is a _sample_ document with a [link](https://example.com) and an entity: (c) 2024.

 - First item

 - Second item

About HTML → Plain Text

Strip tags, decode entities, preserve paragraph breaks. Part of the DevTools Surf developer suite. Browse more tools in the HTML collection.

Use Cases

Content migrators extracting text from legacy HTML pages
Email developers previewing plain-text fallbacks for HTML emails
Developers stripping HTML tags from CMS content for search indexing
Data engineers cleaning scraped HTML for NLP and text analysis pipelines

Tips

Paste raw HTML and get clean text with paragraph breaks preserved
Entities like & and < are automatically decoded to real characters
Use it to extract readable content from email HTML templates

Fun Facts

HTML entities were introduced in HTML 2.0 (1995). There are 2,231 named character references in the HTML5 specification, from & to &ZeroWidthSpace;.
The <p> tag has been part of HTML since Tim Berners-Lee's original 1991 specification — it is one of only 18 tags in the very first version of HTML.
Plain text extraction from HTML is a deceptively hard problem — libraries like Mozilla's Readability (used in Firefox Reader View) use heuristics to handle edge cases.

FAQ

What gets stripped and what's kept?: All tags are removed; visible text is kept. Paragraph breaks become blank lines, headings keep their text but lose their size, lists become hyphen-prefixed lines. Scripts and styles are discarded entirely.
Does it preserve links?: Optional — toggle 'keep links' to append URLs inline like `text (https://example.com)`. Leave off for pure prose output.
How does it handle tables?: Tables are rendered as pipe-separated lines with header underlines. For complex tables the output degrades gracefully — the text is still readable.
Is this useful for email plain-text alternatives?: Exactly the primary use case — generate the text/plain MIME part of a marketing email from the HTML version. Also useful for readability metrics and word counts.

Related HTML Tools

HTML Formatter HTML Pretty Print HTML Validator HTML Viewer HTML Minify HTML Minifier Accessibility Checker ASCII Box Drawer